(1962- ) French artist, later a resident of America. After some brief training in animation, he went to work for DIC Entertainment in the mid-1980s, temporarily requiring him to move to Japan, and he was soon contributing to a number of animated series, including Inspector Gadget (1983-1986), Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors (1985), MASK (1985), The Real Ghost Busters (1986-1991), and Madeline (1993-1995), primarily as an artist but also as a writer and director. He has also done some work for live-action films, prominently including TheTime Machine (2002) and I, Robot (2004).

While continuing to work for films and television programs, Martinière began painting book covers in 2000, and he was soon in great demand. He initially specialized in painting astronomical scenes, space vehicles, and future Cities for works of Hard SF, but also provided Timothy Zahn's Manta's Gift with an arresting portrait of strange winged fish. His eerie cityscapes for Brandon Sanderson's Elantris (2005) and Ian McDonald's River of Gods (2006) earned him Chesley Awards; he received the Hugo for best professional artist in 2008; his haunting image of an enormous railroad for the 2009 edition of McDonald's Desolation Road (1988) earned him a British Science Fiction Association Award; and his works have already been featured in three folios. In a relatively short period of time, then, Martinière has established himself as one of the top cover artists in the field, and one likely to remain productive for many years to come. [GW]

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We passed a couple of major milestones on 1st August: the SFE is now over 4.5 million words, of which John Clute’s own contribution has now exceeded 2 million. (For comparison, the 1993 second edition was 1.3 million words, and … Continue reading →

We’ve reached a couple of milestones recently. The SFE gallery of book covers now has more than 10,000 images: this one seemed appropriate for the 10,000th. Our series of slideshows of thematically linked covers has continued to grow, and Darren Nash of … Continue reading →

We’ve been talking for a while about new features to add to the SFE, and another one has gone live today: the Gallery, which collects together covers for sf books and links them back to SFE entries. To quote from … Continue reading →